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the emblematic literary signal of this disappearance was not Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’ but rather Perec’s
Les Choses
.
THE RIGHT BANK QUARTERS
Palais-Royal
    The character of Paris as a town formed in the Middle Ages is still visible in the way that its quarters are assembled. The Right Bank has four large and compact nuclei, that of Palais-Royal being the most recent, with satellites in the Tuileries-Saint-Honoré and Bourse quarters; Les Halles is the oldest of the four, and has been treated worst; the Sentier is changing now before our eyes; and the Marais is not so much a single quarter as several. Between these main regions there are transition zones that fill the gaps. This is the most densely built region of Paris. 7
    It is easy to imagine that the centre of the world was once where the ruined columns of Athens and Rome now lie, precisely because these are ruins. At the Palais-Royal, on the other hand, in the avenues of its gardens or under the colonnades where stalls selling tin soldiers with their crosses and ribbons, pipes, soft toys and needlepoint form an old-fashioned backdrop, nothing allows you to imagine that for fifty years this place was the agora or forum of Paris, its fame spreading right across Europe. When the Allied forces entered the city after the battle of Waterloo, ‘What was the first thing they asked for in Paris? The Palais-Royal! A Russian officer entered the building on horseback. What was the first thing in the Palais-Royal that they wanted? To sit down in one of the restaurants, whose glorious names had reached even their ears.’ 8
    â€˜No matter what the weather, rain or shine’, Diderot’s narrator explains at the beginning of
Rameau’s Nephew
, ‘it’s my habit every evening at about five o’clock to take a walk around the Palais-Royal. I’m the one you see dreaming on the bench in the Argenson avenue, all alone.’ This was written in the 1760s, so it is still the old Palais-Royal that is referred to here. Cardinal Richelieu had bought a series of buildings and plots at the end of Rue Saint-Honoré, grouping them into a single quadrilateral that is today bordered by Rues Saint-Honoré, des Petits-Champs, de Richelieu and des Bons-Enfants. 9 The Palais-Cardinal constructed by Lemercier stood close to where the Conseil d’État is today. The rest of the land formed a garden: the Argenson avenue that Diderot mentions was to the right, alongside what would become the Galerie de Valois; the avenue opposite took its name from the Café de Foy, the first of those establishments that would be the glory of the Palais-Royal. (The Caveau was founded a little later. Diderot in his old age wrote to his daughter on 28 June 1781: ‘I get bored at home. I go out and get bored even more. The sole and supreme happiness I can enjoy is to go regularly each day at five o’clock to have an ice at the Petit-Caveau.’) In the same year, the Duc de Chartres, future Philippe-Égalité, commissioned Victor Louis to construct the buildings that today surround the garden on three sides. 10 Endowed with its hundred and eighty arcades, the Palais-Royal enjoyed an immediate success:
A unique point on the globe. Visit London, Amsterdam, Madrid or Vienna, you will see nothing like it: a prisoner could live there without getting bored, and it would be years before he even dreamed of freedom . . . It is called the capital of Paris. Everything is to be found there: and for a young man of twenty, with fifty thousand livres invested in government stock, there could be nothing else wanting in life, and he would never even emerge from this fairyland . . . This enchanted abode is a small town of luxury enclosed in a greater one; it is the temple of pleasure, from where scintillating vices have banished even the phantom of shame; no tavern in the world is more graciously depraved. 11
    Towards the end of Louis XVI’s reign, the